06.12.11
Posted in News Roundup at 2:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Second surprise: copying 13000 files (4 GB) from a DVD to the hard-disk is extremely slow in Windows 7: 10 hours! Well, estimated. I lost patience after 2 hours and rebooted. Doing the same operation on Linux: 7 minutes. Amazing.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Alexander Zubov from Kot-in-Action Creative Artel the developers of Steel Storm: Burning Retribution announced a GNU/Linux weekend special !
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KDE team has just announced a few minutes ago (June 10th) the fourth maintenance release for KDE Software Compilation 4.6. This is a minor update, focusing on bug fixing and translation updates.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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So, as of today, I am proud to announce that Mandriva 2011 is powered by the latest, shiniest and greatest X.org server 1.10.2 and Mesa 7.10.2, with all the awesomeness which comes with that. I had to write some small patches to fix some Intel Sandy Bridge crashes here and there, but I think that Mandriva today has probably the most up-to-date X.org stack out there.
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon, despite being in the top ten on Distrowatch, isn’t as publicized as other popular distributions. Xfce is my desktop of choice, so I thought that I would review the Xfce version of Sabayon 5.5, the newest edition.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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I suspect this won’t be my last post like this. I use to just package them up myself but I’m finding that the amount of packages I maintain is increasing and the time I have to actually maintain them is decreasing and I know there’s people that are likely better suited to some of these packages than I am.
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Debian Family
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Philipp is a Debian developer since 2005 and a member of the release team since 2008. Since he took the responsibility of Stable Release Manager, the process has evolved for the best. I asked him to explain how the release team decides what’s fit for stable or not.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Upon the advice of a commenter in one of my previous posts, I am reviewing Pinguy OS 11.04 Mini today. That commenter asked that I test Pinguy OS 11.04, and mentioned the existence of a Mini edition, so I became intrigued, because Pinguy OS is more known for being an “everything-and-the-kitchen-sink” distribution than anything else, so I thought it would be cool to see what the Mini edition would have in store.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice (LO) was forked from the LGPL’ed version of OpenOffice.org some 8 months ago, while also creating a new organization for this: the Document Foundation (TDF). During this time the LibreOffice community has worked on cleaning up the source code, integrating features from another fork, (Go-oo, which was used in most Linux distributions), merging features from subsequent versions of OpenOffice.org and also creating new features themselves. They have a healthy community going with a number of core developers (mostly employed) and a large number of volunteers. There is also work on creating a real foundation much like the KDE e.V in Germany, and they received substantial donations to this goal.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Richard Matthew Stallman started the GNU’s Not Unix project in 1983 to create a totally free operating system, and later the General Public License to guarantee its freedom. By 1991 much of GNU was finished, although it was lacking a kernel – that’s where Linus Torvalds and his Linux kernel come in.
Despite the success of GNU/Linux, Stallman hasn’t opted for an easy life: he campaigns tirelessly to protect our software freedoms, alerting us to potential threats that new technologies bring.
Reader’s Picks
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The specific rule that Whitfield is working to repeal involves standards that would require utilities to install devices to capture as much CO2 as possible from industrial boilers and waste incinerators, a move the EPA estimates would prevent thousands of premature deaths from heart attacks and respiratory illnesses every year.
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Censorship
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Whitehall sources have revealed that British intelligence officers successfully sabotaged the launch of the first English language website set up by an al-Qaida affiliate… A pdf file containing fairy cake recipes was inserted into Inspire to garble most of the 67 pages of the online magazine, including instructions on how to “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” [becomes mom's cupcakes]
Because they altered the site, we can’t be sure what it originally contained and so Whitehall only manages to discredit itself and terrorize political opposition.
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the question of whether Computacenter has a Microsoft bias. It’s like asking if the Pope is a Catholic.
Other small firms have given up, and Microsoft can ruin those who complain. Now we see that libel law is use to threaten firms that realize they are hopelessly locked out.
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RMS adds, “If you watch videos in YouTube, don’t use Flash. Use the new Webm format. Adding &html5=True to the URL should get you this, without need to identify yourself.”
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It would be better to completely deregulate the spectrum than to bring back this fig leaf. The fairness doctrine was never particularly effective and fake balance is a cornerstone of manufactured consent.
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… government cannot order Google, Apple, or others to ban such apps providing legal information, Congress is trying to apply pressure through the “chokepoints” of major Internet firms … Anecdotal evidence suggests that when many persons know that there are DUI checkpoints on their route, they either don’t drink or find a designated driver who isn’t drinking … Given the realities of this situation, it is difficult to view the Congressional pressures being asserted as much more in the end than political posturing,
People who want to avoid the delay and humiliation of arbitrary roadside searches will have to turn to the countless websites and other services offering the same information.
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Privacy
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users could not reasonably have known that Facebook would use their photos to build a biometric database in order to implement a facial recognition technology under the control of Facebook… Facebook’s constant changes to the privacy settings of users, which they alleged had made it virtually impossible for users to control who gained access to their personal information.
Read EPIC’s complaint here, it’s much better than FT’s summary.
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Facebook has turned on automatic face recognition on photos. Facebook says that it only suggests identifications for faces in photos for people who are the user’s friends. However, it might run the algorithm over every photo posted and not publicly announce the results.
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Cameras in the toilets; CCTV in the classroom; pupils’ fingerprints kept in a database … the surveillance state is quietly invading our schools
As the Philadelphia laptop camera spy scandal illustrates, students have no privacy with school issued computers. I give my kids their own computers with free software and full drive encryption for real research and self expression.
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Civil Rights
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“I campaigned for the toughest immigration laws, and I’m proud of the legislature for working tirelessly to create the strongest immigration bill in the country.” – Govenor Robert Bentley.
The legislation also makes it a criminal offense to provide transport or housing to an illegal immigrant. The state will have to check the citizenship of students, and any business that knowingly employs an illegal immigrant will be penalized.
This will be a pain for everyone but especially for people with brown skin who want a place to live, work for a living, send their kids to school or take the city bus. Papers, please. Because Alabama schools require vaccination, excluding immigrant children from schools will immediately impact public health. Conditions for actual immigrants will be worse.
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maybe all those tourists who boycotted Arizona for the last year will avoid spending their money in Alabama, and come back and rent our vacation rental guest cottages down here in Tubac. Then again, I doubt if the tourists from New York and Massachusetts who come to Arizona in the winter ever thought about going to the Redneck Riviera.
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unionization is associated with a decrease of anywhere from 17 to 33 percent in traumatic injuries, and a drop of 33 to 72 percent in fatal injuries.
Burning coal is a bad idea due to global warming no matter how safe mining is but those who work in it suffer most.
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Intellectual Monopolies
Miami Beach Memorial Day Shooting May 30th 2011, cellphone video
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.11.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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SELinux labels are placed on disk during the installation by a combination of Anaconda and rpm. Anaconda actually includes the latest /etc/selinux/targeted/files/file_context and /etc/selinux/targeted/policy/policy.26 in its initrd. When anaconda starts rpm, rpm reads this file and proceeds to place the labels on disk. RPM has SELinux awareness built into it and asks the kernel to place the default label on the disk for every object that it creates from its payload. If an rpm post install script runs during the install, the labels are created using the standard process labelling described below. Any file system objects created by Anaconda before loading the policy into the kernel will be relabelled by Anaconda using restorecon.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has announced Linux kernel 3.0-rc1, this marks the end of 2.6.x series line which has 40 releases since late 2003.
To mark this event, Con Kolivas has made a tarball archive (163MB) of all 2.6.x releases available for download. The archive uses lrzip compression which can be installed from the standard Ubuntu apt-get repository.
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Remember KQ Infotech? KQ Infotech was the Indian company that ported the ZFS file-system to Linux as an out-of-tree kernel module (after deriving the code from the LLNL ZFS Linux work) and KQ’s interesting methods of engagement in our forums. The company was successful in delivering an open-source ZFS module for Linux that performed semi-well and didn’t depend upon FUSE (the file-systems for user-space module) like other implementations. However, this ZFS Linux code appears to no longer be worked on by KQ Infotech.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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An infinite Avant Window Navigator AWN dock themes collections looks amazing with different styles ” Lucido, Floaty, Edgy, Curved, 3D, and Flat style”. Also you might want to check Part 1 and Part 2 AWN themes.
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This is a question often asked by new users of Linux. (See here.) The short answer often given is no, but that answer often stirs controversy. (See here.)
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GIMP from SVN (2.7.x) comes with a built-in single-window mode (can be disabled) but I find it unstable sometimes so I prefer to use the stable GIMP 2.6.x, especially since there are so many goodies you can use to enhance it, like GIMP Painter and GIMP Paint Studio, G’MIC or the GIMP Plugin Registry package.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The latest installement of Gaming On Linux interview time has been well spent with Troy the founder of MyGameCompany.com
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Desktop Environments
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Enlightenment – This is the original name of the project. Today when it is referenced it should refer to the project as a whole – not just one particular part.
DR17 – Also often called E17. This refers to the next major revision of the Enlightenment desktop/window manager. It is under heavy development (and has been for some time). The current stable revision of the desktop is DR16.
EFLs – Stands for “Enlightenment Foundation Libraries”. These are the core of the Enlightenment desktop, but not the desktop itself. In simplest terms the EFLs are to the Enlightenment desktop as GTK is to Gnome and QT is to KDE.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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It looks like we are doing something right because we are most popular Fedora Remix. Just click on Smolt Stats and then on OS tab to see for yourself.
Of course we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for great Fedora community, thank you all. Fedora has an amazing community and amazing tools that make the job of creating Fedora Remix quite easy.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.04 Unity brought in many important UI improvements and Ubuntu Lens has been one of the highlights. Finding and launching applications and files in Ubuntu have never been easier. But Unity Lens concept is not confined to just applications and files search, it is much bigger than that. A slew of really cool Lenses are in development and some of them are even available for installation already. Interesting list of Unity Lenses you can install right now.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In other words, LibreOffice will be both months ahead of OpenOffice.org, and able to borrow OpenOffice.org code, and OpenOffice.org behind and unable to borrow LibreOffice code.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In a recent interview the the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Richard Stallman says that the public should disobey Spain’s new anti-piracy law.
“It is as unfair as Sarkozy and Berlusconi, and should be disobeyed by users,” Stallman says referring to The Sinde Act.
“How many authors writing earn money to pay his expenses? A hundred, five hundred? Is that enough to restrict freedom of all? Collecting user’s private data should only be legal with a court order when there is suspicion that someone is preparing a crime. Non-commercial file-sharing should be legalized. It is a fundamental freedom.”
Stallman further commented on his hair (“my long hair was a political decision”, and his baby (the Free Software Foundation), which he says accomplished more than most real kids.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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In Silicon Valley, where the latest tech innovations are celebrated, a group of hackers is creating new purposes for old technology.
The nascent movement, Random Hacks of Kindness, has, like many smart things born in the region, quickly spread around the globe. The idea sprang from a community of hackers — unlike criminals who aim to disrupt governments or steal data, these engineers work on code for the good of humanity — who met for a weekend hackathon two years ago to work on various projects. The concept is to deploy existing technology in new ways that address various challenges facing the world, such as locating missing people during a natural disaster.
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Cablegate
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THE nominations for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize have been released – now it’s about time they released some of the previous winners.
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Finance
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One more thing I wanted to point about about Andrew Ross Sorkin’s story defending Goldman Sachs and Lloyd Blankfein the other day, in which it was posited that Goldman did not, in fact, have a “Big Short” in 2007. Sorkin says that according to Goldman, the firm’s net short position that summer may have been as low as $5 billion, and not $16 billion as claimed, therefore Lloyd Blankfein was not lying when he told the Senate, “We did not have a massive short bet.”
Given that Sorkin was apparently given access to a large trove of documents allowing him to make the case that Goldman didn’t have that “Big Short” on, I thought it would be instructive for readers to see what kind of answers the Senate got when it asked Goldman executives the same questions about the size of the banks’ short bet. They gave Sorkin the whole store, but Levin’s committee basically got name, rank, serial number, and a big legalese “eat me.”
See if you can notice some consistencies in the following statements.
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Privacy
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Facebook Inc. will be probed by European Union data-protection regulators over a feature that uses face-recognition software to suggest people’s names to tag in pictures without their permission.
A group of privacy watchdogs drawn from the EU’s 27 nations will study the measure for possible rule violations, said Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Authorities in the U.K. and Ireland said they are also looking into the photo-tagging function on the world’s most popular social-networking service.
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You may remember that back in March at the LibrePlanet 2011 conference, we presented the 2010 Award for Projects of Social Benefit to the Tor Project — by using free software, Tor has enabled roughly 36 million people around the world to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them in control of their privacy and anonymity.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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We recently noted that a judge in one of the biggest mass copyright infringement lawsuits ever filed, representing 23,322 potential infringers of the movie The Expendables, had allowed the lawyers at US Copyright Group to issue subpoenas on those people in order to properly serve them with the lawsuit. However, it appears the judge is reconsidering — perhaps because lots of people have since raised the point that these efforts often appear more like a shakedown than any legitimate lawsuit, and the judge has taken notice. After saying that “several issues… have recently come to light regarding this case”, he goes on to berate US Copyright Group lawyers for failing to have served a single person out of the 23,322.
Police Abuse In Puerto Rico
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Intellectual Monopoly, Patents at 9:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Latest news and commentary on patent monopolies (mostly from the United States)
• Supreme Court Signals Pending Patent Reform Is Unconstitutional (by Dan Ravicher, a pro-Free software lawyer, following the i4i decision at the SCOTUS, whose recent decisions have been terrible [1, 2])
“Congress is, unfortunately, on the verge of passing the so-called “America Invents Act” (S. 23 and H.R. 1249) that would change our patent system from the “first to invent” system we’ve had since our founding, to a “first to file” system. This is not only harmful to small entrepreneurs, but it also violates the plain language of the Constitution, which requires patents be granted to “inventors”, not “filers.” To be sure, the Supreme Court just this week reminded us that the Constitution guarantees patent rights shall vest in inventors, not their employers. In a case involving Stanford University, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the very first sentence of his opinion for the Court, “Since 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor.” The Chief Justice continued to write, “Although much in intellectual property law has changed in the 220 years since the first Patent Act, the basic idea that inventors have the right to patent their inventions has not. … Our precedents confirm the general rule that rights in an invention belong to the inventor.” Thus, the Supreme Court unquestionably believes that the American patent system is based on awarding patents to inventors. Scholars also agree that changing from the “first to invent gets the patent” system that we have today to a “first to file an application gets the patent” system being considered by Congress would violate the Constitution.
“So one is left to ask, why is Congress about to pass a law that would benefit large corporations, harm small entrepreneurs and violate the Constitution? I don’t know, but maybe if you call your representative (212-224-3121) they can explain it to you.”
• SCOTUS makes patent holders happy, upholds $290M Microsoft verdict (by Timothy B. Lee, who is against the patent propaganda machine)
In a New York Times op-ed supporting Microsoft, UCLA law professor Doug Lichtman had argued that changing the standard of proof would “give relief to the countless businesses that today find themselves vulnerable to patents that shouldn’t have been issued in the first place.” A wide variety of companies and public interest groups, including Google, Red Hat, Walmart, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation, filed briefs echoing that point. But the Supreme Court decided that whatever the merits of these policy arguments, they couldn’t overrule the text of the patent law and the courts’ long history of employing the higher standard.
• Roche Wins as High Court Limits University Patent Rights
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a ruling that limits the patent rights of research universities, threw out Stanford University’s suit against a Roche Holding AG (ROG) unit over methods for testing the effectiveness of AIDS treatments.
Voting 7-2, the justices upheld a lower court’s conclusion that a scientist working at Stanford in Palo Alto, California, transferred his rights to the discoveries to a company whose line of business Roche later bought. Under the court’s reasoning, the transfer made the company a co-owner of three disputed patents.
• Investors Speaking Up About Patents Harming Innovation
Dixon points out a key part of the problem is that so many patents are clearly obvious to anyone skilled in the art. He notes that any competent engineer could create what’s found in the vast majority of software patents, and notes that the examiners simply aren’t competent enough to recognize what’s obvious. Dixon, who is both an investor and a long-term entrepreneur, certainly knows these things. What’s amazing to me, honestly, is how few people in Silicon Valley actually think patents are a good idea any more. The system has become so distorted that most of the people they’re supposed to benefit the most don’t want them, but feel compelled to get them due to the system. What a massive amount of waste, leading to a mess that holds back innovation.
Wilson makes one other statement that I thought was interesting. He compared patenting software to patenting music, noting that neither makes sense.
• Software patents should be abolished
The entire software industry works like this, and the use of patents is very rare relative to all software that’s written. The market rewards applied innovation, but doesn’t try to artificially inhibit competition. It combines the best parts of capitalism, collaboration, and a vast public domain.
Our industry is booming, innovation is rapid and rampant, and everyone’s making a living. The world could benefit immensely if more industries could innovate as rapidly and significantly as the software industry. We’re doing great, almost entirely without using patents.
• The patent balance (Marco Arment is against aiming high like the FFII and FSF)
My sense is that most programmers would now argue against software patents, just as Marco has. We’re 30 years into the software patent system and seeing its downsides: the patent term is way too long for software; too many patents have been issued; and patent extortion is rewarded instead of punished. What’s gone wrong?
[...]
I said at the top that I’m sympathetic to the idea that software patents should never have been allowed. But whether they should have been allowed or not, they are a fact of life today and that’s not going to change. If you think the patent system is out of balance, you should work to put it back in balance, not chase after some fantasy of turning back the clock.
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Posted in Antitrust, Apple, Patents at 8:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple falls behind Linux (Android) in the phones market, so it is exploiting other people’s work a little more, blocking competitors and subsequently it gets reported to the Bundeskartellamt
WHILE IT is true that Microsoft has been trying to give Apple antitrust trouble (we covered examples before), a lot of the complaints against Apple are generally justified because the company is extremely arrogant in a way that is infectious and it drives computing towards prison-like conditions faster than Microsoft ever did. Apple is about restriction that is typically disguised as ease of use or trendiness.
Apple’s crowd of fans (some are genuine) would typically whine about critics and shockingly argue that Apple takes computing in a good direction and invents things. But it’s utter nonsense. All Apple has done in recent years is exploit Free software projects that truly innovated and then added marketing to them; but the marketed brands are Apple’s and Apple was the sole supplier of all products. Nice, eh? That’s a nice monopoly you got there. When Apple loses the game — as it often does to Linux these days — then it files petty lawsuits using software patents. That’s how distasteful the company can be. The only thing wrong with Apple is that they have no ethics. The company is also copying and them stomping on ISVs, just like Microsoft did many times over the years. This is an observation we mentioned some years ago; Apple is bundling other people’s ideas without their permission and without even credit. One critic asks in a new headline, “Apple Stealing From Its Developers?” (“stealing” is the wrong word, but Steve Jobs uses it to describe Apple’s own behaviour).
It seems Apple has run out of ideas and has started looking at the apps developed by external developers and started branding them as their own.
Yes, Apple has done this for ages and it can also block competition by banning it from the so-called “app store” (Apple trademark). This too was done, e.g. when someone developed copy-and-paste functionality for the iPhone. Developers and partners who help Apple are basically making a mistake and wasting their time/effort because Apple fed patent trolls and created blockades. Having funded the source of Lodsys's patent, Apple now pretends to care about developers, who are affected by a ” Bulls*** Claim”. Where is their backlash against Apple?
“Apple is inherently a jail. The walls may be padded, but it’s still a jail.”Interestingly enough, last week we saw Apple making a step towards taking users’ data with the so-called ‘cloud’ (Fog Computing) and TuneCore’s CEO says (probably paraphrased) that “Apple Has Just Monetized Pirated Content” (Steve Jobs famously asked, “why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”). In any event, another company, Simfy, “says that it has filed a letter of complaint with the Bundeskartellamt, the country’s antitrust authority, claiming that Apple is abusing its market position by delaying the approval of the company’s iPad app. It has been more than three months since Simfy submitted its app for approval.”
Yes, all those DRM-laden shops are major trouble. Apple abuses its power and blocks what in theory could be partners. Apple is inherently a jail. The walls may be padded, but it’s still a jail. █
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Posted in Deception, FUD, Microsoft at 7:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More FUD is released by Microsoft’s partners in business; we counter with facts
WHENEVER we spot fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) there is a valid reason for issuing a rebuttal. If we comes across FUD with statistics rather than fun with statistics, then we typically inform readers. It’s one of this site’s goals to counter disinformation, which is disseminated by PR people (it is their job to deceive people). One piece of disinformation that we noticed the other day is LAMP FUD that Pogson has already deconstructed.
Let’s see… they investigated 270 attacks on 203 million sites and they are concerned about the frequency of attacks on LAMP sites… Hmmm. That other OS runs 18% of sites and gets 19% of the attacks reported…
Yes, Microsoft is hardly used on Web servers. It is FUD from liars for hire such as IDC that leads some people to thinking that Microsoft does well on servers. It’s FUD with statistics, where basically the unit measured is price, not actual units used. The metric is discriminatory by design. Those who do go with Windows for servers often suffer the consequences and even for Microsoft it has proven to be a peril because its online services go offline quite routinely. No wonder “Office 365″ (maybe they should call it Office 360 for the 5 days of aggregate downtime) is such a disappointment and it continues to receive some negative reactions when the PR factor is set aside. Even Microsoft boosters talk about it.
Anyway, since we’ve mentioned IDC, how about this article which led to the allegation that Microsoft had paid IDC specifically for this FUD? Quoting “Dave U. Random”:
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Another (Microsoft) PAID FOR report by IDC
Microsoft has yet again spent big bucks in a last ditch effort to rake in some mobile phone marketshare (if only virtually). This so-called report by IDC claims that Windows Phone 7 will take 20.3 percent of the market in 2015, beating iOS yet trailing Android (Linux) by a wide margin.
Most of these paid for shills are claiming that M$’s deal with Nokia will help its marketshare, with the midguided belief that every single phone Nokia sells today will one day magically turn into a WP7 sale, which is simply proposterous. Nokia’s marketshare is dwindling so fast that the Redmondians can hope to gain at best 10% marketshare and there’s a real good chance that Nokia won’t even make it to 2015, which is an eternity away in mobile-time. If Nokia falters or gets purchased by another vendor, all these numbers will add up to nought.
WP7 is already down to 1% marketshare and still falling. Next year there will be no more Windows Mobile phones in the statistics revealing that the emperor has no clothes.
We could not find the IDC report. Even if we had, it might be somewhere behind a paywall, hiding the sponsor or commissioner or the so-called ‘study’. We already know that Microsoft and its front groups pay top bucks to IDC (and to IDG for advertisements), but can anyone verify that this report was yet another one of the Microsoft-paid IDC lies? To give an example, Microsoft paid for one such IDC report to make rosy predictions about Vista just when it was released.
IDC does not care about truth, it cares about clients. Watch out for FUD from these firms who take bidding for their biases. And for those who think that IDC’s lies are a victimless crime, read this. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, OpenSUSE at 7:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The issue of OpenSUSE’s ties to Attachmate gets revisited; The new “OpenSUSE strategy” leaves some people unhappy
A FEW months ago we repeated our suggestion that the OpenSUSE volunteers should do what Mageia developers did (found true independence) and just branch away from Novell/Attachmate/SLE*, which is principally about selling proprietary software*; this triage views OpenSUSE as s product, not a community. It is exploitative and it is harming the brand. But the matter of fact is, many OpenSUSE volunteers have already left while some are eternally involved. We named a few notable departures, including the project’s boosters, who hardly show up anymore (with exceptions) and the project nowadays is driven mostly by paid staff. Recently, this paid staff was trying to recruit more people to become involved as volunteers. In the “Strategy Community Statement”, for example, it said that it “has many sponsors including Attachmate Group/SUSE BU as main sponsor.” It also said that it “should not depend on any of the sponsors doing everything.” Let’s not forget the money from Google for GSoC, which is still going on [1, 2] along with events like IPv6 Day at SUSE.
“If you wanted to join Apache OpenOffice, could you? Did you guys vote on the Attachmate announcement regarding all that before it was released?”
–Pamela Jones, GroklawTed Haeger once explained: “I parted ways with Novell for the very same reasons that you cite about the MS agreement–not its evilness, but the careless disregard for the people that the company never bothered to consult (including me).” He was one of the main community people at the time, working for Novell. Even back then OpenSUSE was excluded from decision-making. Groklaw, which has been sceptical of the independence of OpenSUSE, asks: “If you wanted to join Apache OpenOffice, could you? Did you guys vote on the Attachmate announcement regarding all that before it was released?” We wrote about this announcement when Novell’s (Attachmate) PR department published it on behalf of SUSE. Was the SUSE community consulted at all?
One person’s “thoughts about the openSUSE strategy” show that there is disagreement even from within (this person is blogging about OpenSUSE and syndicated in the Planet). It says: “The current SWOT does provide a lot of useful information (keep in mind this document was produced by the community), and this information isn’t translated in the current strategy document. It would be a waste to neglect the SWOT Analysis that was made in the past, which provides very accurate information on things to work out and things that can become a problem. Now, if we have information on what’s not working, what needs to be improved, shouldn’t this information be used as a basis for the strategy statements and shouldn’t it be clear and objective?”
The truth of the matter is that Attachmate still controls OpenSUSE by the trademark at the very least. The OpenSUSE Medical distribution is getting new leadership [1, 2, 3, 4], but this project too depends on the trademarks it cannot own. As OpenOffice.org shows, the trademarks play a considerable role and OpenSUSE is no exception. There is apparently a plan for another OpenSUSE release in quite a while from now:
systemd is coming for next openSUSE (12.1) scheduled next fall.
Someone recently asked us why there are not any SUSE forks in existence. To fork SLE* would be hard for reasons we explained some years ago (Novell makes it difficult) and for OpenSUSE to be forked would probably make sense. █
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* The Attachmate-owned Novell is still occupied with Fog Computing hype while “Novelldemo” releases many videos on Vibe (hosted) and abend.org notes the new releases of proprietary software [1, 2, 3]. Novell/Attachmate is far from a FOSS-embracing company. It may only be exploiting FOSS, but then again, so does Apple.
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